Free Bird

To win back customers, McDonald’s is changing how it raises its poultry. Will offering cage-free eggs and antibiotic- free chickens revive the fast-food giant?

- Beth Kowitt

STEVE EASTER BROOK doesn’t seem like the sloganeering type. He’s cool, a rational technocrat rather than a fiery head coach. Yet Easter brook has two slogans he regularly employs. The phrases—“Act first, talk later” and “Progress over perfection”—hint that beneath his reserved exterior he’s aiming for real change.

Easter brook, 49, has been McDonald’s CEO since March 2015, and he has clearly delivered on the first of his maxims. In a year and a half at the helm he has begun paring costs and decided to move McDonald’s headquarters from the suburbs back to Chicago. More important, in the U.S. market he launched McDonald’s successful All Day Breakfast, removed high-fructose corn syrup from the company’s buns, ended the use of key antibiotics in the company’s chickens, and embarked on a 10-year plan to liberate the birds that lay its eggs from the cages in which they have long been confined. The latter two changes are potentially transformative not only for McDonald’s—where chickens and eggs now account for 50% of the items on the menu—but for the entire American food industry.

It’s perhaps a surprise that it has fallen to an Englishman— educated at Watford Grammar School for Boys and St. Chad’s College at Durham University, where he played cricket—to revive this most American of institutions. Sitting in a conference room at McDonald’s Oak Brook, Illinois, head quarters and wearing a pink dress shirt tucked neatly into blue jeans, Easterbrook is the picture of British diffidence, quick to deflect attention from himself.